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What A Recent Birth Cost For An American Parent In South Korea

“That’s my kind of ‘pro-life’ policy.” By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (8/26/19) The inefficiently expensive, unjust and profit-driven model of the American corporate industrialized medical profit system leaves most citizens with a very limited vision of what could be the humane and cost-effective norm for health care under a universal, Medicare For All kind of model of universal health care. Recently, a family member and his wife gave birth to a baby and he sent me a rundown of the support they received in the South Korean model of health care. From conception until the baby’s second birthday…


Dem Progressives Poll WAAAY Ahead Of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer & Corrupt Corporate Democrats

“She’s a trainwreck.” There is only one politician who polls worse than Nancy Pelosi. Guess who that is… A panel on the Young Turks takes a dive into some recent polling to come up with some surprising results. Despite the frantic spin of corporate democrats and some of their smelly polling misinformation, progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and AOC significantly outpace corporate dems, including Joe Biden. The question of course is: Will a dose of polling reality budge the corporate dems? Link to 17-Minute Video (Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2019. Open source and free…


Joe Biden Inspires No One – Not Even His Own Wife

The case for Biden’s invincibility is especially baffling – he’s been running for the Democratic nomination (and losing) since the 1980s. By Bhaskar Sunkara The Guardian (8/23/19) Much like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden’s Democratic primary campaign has thus far cloaked itself in an aura of inevitability. You might not like Joe Biden. He might say racist or sexist stuff from time to time. His gaffes might be occurring at an alarming rate. He might have uninspiring policy ideas. But he’s going to win the primary anyway, so you better get used to him. While other candidates are galvanizing people around Medicare for…


After Decades Of Corporate ‘Decimation’ Of Unions, Sanders Calls For Workers To Win The Class War Waged Against Them

“If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it’s time that the working class of this country won that war.” By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/21/19) After he unveiled a comprehensive plan to double union membership and strengthen labor rights, Sen. Bernie Sanders said during an AFL-CIO event in Iowa on Wednesday that it is time for America’s workers to win the class war against corporate elites. “If there is going to be class warfare in this country,” said Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, “it’s time that the working class of this country won that war.” Sanders explained…


IRAN CRISIS: Have We Learned Nothing From The Disastrous Iraq War?

“The credibility of the United States on intelligence is really low right now. If that intelligence is going to cause U.S. forces to die and bleed in combat, the U.S. to deploy military force, I’m going to be very skeptical of that intelligence. Very skeptical.” — Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003. By Mehdi Hasan Deconstructed Podcast (6/20/18) CALLS FOR MILITARY ACTION against Iran grew louder this week in response to the Trump administration’s claims that the Islamic Republic was responsible for attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of…


Goebbels: The Truth About Political Lying (Or Why Trump Lies So Much)

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda.


Russia Monitor: Trump vs Trump Heats Up & Goes Skittering Down The Drain

“I’m running because he’s unfit, somebody needs to step up and there needs to be an alternative. The country is sick of this guy’s tantrum, he’s a child.” — Former Illinois congressman and Tea Party favorite, Joe Walsh announces his primary challenge of Trump. ***** “If the Dow drops 1,000 points in two days the President should be impeached immediately!” — ‘Purported’ Trump tweet from November 2012. By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (8/26/19) The important numbers are: 3, 1, 23, 2.59/1000, ‘limitless’ and 138. Trump is like an erupting volcano crowding out the sun. Trump has always been angry…


The Dark & Terrifying Legacy Of David Koch

By Ryan Cooper The Week (8/23/19) David Koch, one of the two infamous billionaire Koch brothers, died Friday at the age of 79. The Wall Street Journal is quick to point out that, in addition funding a vast conservative political network, Koch gave about $1.3 billion of his nearly-$60 billion fortune to various philanthropies. But what Koch may ultimately be most remembered for is helping to seed the climate-change denial movement in the 1990s. Indeed, David Koch was one of the most powerful people in the world over the last three or so decades, and he did his level best to stymie any effort…


How To Become A Greedy Corporate CEO Scam Artist In Five Easy Steps

And how to stop it in five more. By Robert Reich RobertReich.org (8/21/19) Average CEO pay at big corporations topped 14.5 million dollars in 2018. That’s after an increase of 5.2 million dollars per CEO over the past decade, while the average worker’s pay has increased just 7,858 dollars over the decade.  Just to catch up to what their CEO made in 2018 alone, it would take the typical worker 158 years. This explosion in CEO pay relative to the pay of average workers isn’t because CEOs have become so much more valuable than before. It’s not due to the so-called “free market.”…




Right Wing Religion Round-Up: Trump Gets Stumped By Easy Bible Questions In Newly Resurfaced Video

“I have a great relationship with God.” By Lee Moran HuffPost (8/23/19) An old video in which President Donald Trump dodges questions about the Bible is going viral again in light of the president’s new claim that he is the “chosen one.” In the 2015 interview on Bloomberg Politics that Twitter user @Caring_Atheist shared online Wednesday, Trump (who’d earlier called the Bible his favorite book) appears reluctant to reveal his favorite verses. “Because to me that’s very personal,” Trump sidesteps. “You know, when I talk about the Bible it’s very personal so I don’t want to get into verses. The…


AMERICAN MADE: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis

What happens in El Norte, doesn’t stay in El Norte. By Rebecca Gordon TomDispatch (8/15/19) It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife. For two years, members of my little Episcopal church…


“Beyond logic and humanity” — True Horror As Trump DHS Announces Rule To Allow Indefinite Detention Of Migrant Families

“The ever-increasing immigration court backlog means these immigrant families could be held for months or even years.” By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/21/19) Rights groups reacted with horror and outrage on Wednesday after the Trump adminstration unveiled a rule that would allow the federal government to detain migrant families for an unlimited period of time. “This is yet another cruel attack on children, who the Trump administration has targeted again and again with its anti-immigrant policies,” Madhuri Grewal, policy counsel with the ACLU, said in a statement. “The government should not be jailing kids, and certainly shouldn’t be seeking to put more kids…


How Racist Dog Whistles Work: Why Some White Liberals Will Vote For Donald Trump

  By Arthur Delaney HuffPost (8/19/19) Reporters often describe President Donald Trump’s racism as a strategy to excite Republican voters, but it may actually work better on certain self-identified liberals. That’s the conclusion a pair of academic researchers reached after conducting an experiment with hundreds of white Americans earlier this year. A subset of liberals, not conservatives, could be the group “most responsive to the implicit ― and sometimes explicit ― racial appeals of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer wrote in their paper, which appears this month in Socius, a scholarly journal published by the American Sociological…


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‘Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman’s Marvel Essay ‘refused publication for Orange Skull Trump dig’

Maus author says he was told the comics giant – whose chairman is a prominent Trump supporter – was trying to remain apolitical. By Alison Flood The Guardian (8/16/19) Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”. Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer prize for Maus, his story of the Holocaust, has written for Saturday’s Guardian that he was approached by publisher the…


American “Just-Us” For Sale: Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success In Criminalizing Pipeline Protests

“Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system.” By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/20/19) As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry’s success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors. Speaking during a conference in Washington, D.C. in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted “model legislation” that states across the nation have passed in recent months. AFPM…


Russia Monitor: More & More Bat Shit Crazy? Yes, No, Yes, No, YES!!!

    By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (8/22/19) Dear Fellow Readers, Sometimes there is a perfect headline. There is one key Trump-Russia flavor to Trump’s recent frenzy of batshit statements, but it’s hard to pass this up: The President Is Currently Serving Up Several Flavors of Batshit on Twitter The ‘twitter’ part is irrelevant, what Esquire columnist Jack Holmes describes as “lunacy” is the important part. Holmes highlights (and links to the Trump tweets) Trump’s notice that he will “reschedule” his trip to Denmark since Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen didn’t immediately embrace Trump’s offer to purchase Greenland. Whatever you…


Matt Taibbi — Trump 2020: Be Very, Very Afraid

Middle Americans got so used to getting nothing out of elections, they started treating national politics for what it had become to them, a distant, pretentious sitcom. By Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone (8/19/19) Early evening, August, Cincinnati. The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in…


‘A Snake Eating It’s Tail’ — Stock Buybacks Are Yet Another Wall Street Scam You Will Pay For

“All those billions are not just going into the air, they are going into someone’s pocket.” [Editor’s Note: One of the business experts interviewed warns we are at grave risk of yet another financial meltdown on the scale of what we experienced in 2008. — Mark L. Taylor] Business Daily / BBC (8/16/19) Share buybacks are when a publicly-listed company uses some of its spare cash to buy up shares in itself, in order to drive the share price up and benefit shareholders. The practice has become so common that the amount of buyback money extracted from corporations exceeds their…


Canadian Broadcasting Archives: Pete Seeger On Being Blacklisted In 1950’s America

CBC (7/10/13) In this clip from 1965, folk singer and activist Pete Seeger talks about being black listed for “un-American activities” and his refusal to answer questions that violated his Constitutional Rights. Link to 4+-Minute Video Here’s The Song Seeger Offered To Sing At His Trail — “Wasn’t That A Time”: Link to 3+-Minute Video ***** The Story Behind “Forever Young” By Pete Seeger   Amnesty International USA (3/14/12) Mini-documentary about the recording of the song “Forever Young” by Pete Seeger featured on the album “Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International”.  Link…


Alarm As Trump Requests Permanent Reauthorization Of NSA Mass Spying Program Exposed By Snowden

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/16/19) Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates raised alarm Thursday after the Trump administration called on Congress to reauthorize an NSA mass surveillance program that was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The New York Times, which obtained the Trump administration’s request to Congress, reported that “the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act.” “The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but…


Leaked FBI Documents Reveal That At A Time Of Deadly White Extremist Violence It Lists Black ‘Extremists’ As Biggest Threat

FBI’s ‘Iron Fist’ Program The Young Turks (8/9/19) “Under President Trump, the FBI’s official counterterrorism priorities have included “Black Identity Extremists,” “anti-authority” extremists, and “animal rights/environmental extremists,” according to leaked Bureau documents obtained exclusively by The Young Turks. The documents, many of which are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive” and “For Official Use Only,” also reference a mysterious plan to mitigate the threat of “Black Identity Extremists” with a program codenamed “IRON FIST” involving the use of undercover agents. Each fiscal year, the FBI headquarters updates its Consolidated Strategy Guide, which lists the Bureau’s priorities in numerous domains such as counterterrorism,…


Notably Quotable: “”There’s nothing in the middle of the road but …”

  “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”  — Jim Hightower ***** “Jill Biden may have settled for her husband, but I’m not sure why anyone else should.” — Sarah Jones, columnist, New York Magazine. ***** “The nation is still reeling from two mass shootings. The financial markets are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding. Tension between the United States and Iran continues to mount. North Korea keeps testing new missiles. India is playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong…


GOP Leadership Tells House Republicans To Just Lie About White Supremacist Gun Massacres By Calling It ‘violence from the Left’

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King Jr. By David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement (8/17/19) House Republican leadership has sent a memo to GOP members of Congress directing them to lie about right wing white supremacist gun massacres, and to call it “violence from the left.” The memo, which The Tampa Bay Times acquired, includes talking points for congressional Republicans to parrot when speaking with reporters or constituents. It instructs them on how to address questions about gun violence, including the domestic terrorism recently perpetrated in El Paso, Texas. If asked a question…


Former FBI Agent Reveals The Agency Could Fight Far-Right Violence But Chooses Not To

  By Mike German The Guardian (8/16/19) Federal law enforcement officials have all the tools necessary to address far-right violence proactively – as my own successful investigations as an FBI undercover agent in the 1990s indicate. They have simply chosen as a matter of policy not to prioritize these cases. What role racism, latent or overt, plays in these decisions has yet to be explored. There are currently 52 federal terrorism laws available to address entirely domestic acts of political violence. Congress has also passed five federal hate crimes statutes specifically designed to punish the types of violence white supremacists and other far-right militants…


Gov. Evers Bows, Bends, Scrapes, Grovels, Rolls Over & Served Himself Up With Whipped Cream On His Tummy To Koch Brothers Backed WMC Corporate Looters

  His message sounded like something that could have “dribbled out of the mouth of Scott Walker.”   [Editor’s Note: Really, Tony? Do you think surrender and humiliation is what we voted for in a governor? Disgraceful. No doubt a Gov. Mike McCabe would have delivered a very different and much-needed message on behalf of the people of Wisconsin to this band of thieves.  — Mark L. Taylor] By Matt Rothschild, Executive Director Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (8/14/19) Gov. Tony Evers bowed down to the biggest business lobby in Wisconsin yesterday [4/13]. In a speech to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which…


Bulletproof: The Nation Has Officially Lost Its Collective Mind

“We’re asking children to stand up to gunmen because lawmakers are too scared to stand up to the gun lobby. (These products) shouldn’t exist.” By Abbey Zimet Common Dreams (8/13/19) In a new grim grotesquerie, sales of bulletproof backpacks are up as much as 300% as parents frantic to keep their children alive prepare to send them to this year’s killing fields – once called going back to school – after our latest slaughter in El Paso and Dayton. Really, it’s little wonder we’re now sending our kids to classrooms in princess-and-superhero-emblazoned anti-ballistic armor: Even apart from massacres, roughly 100 Americans a day die from guns…


Co-Founder Of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ Lays Out The Brutal, Relentless Truth About Climate Crisis We All Confront & Most Deny

“We are facing massive starvation in the next ten years, social collapse and the possible extinction of civil rights.” HARDtalk / BBC (8/16/19) Back in 2015, the nations of the world made a formal commitment to keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade. So much for fine words; global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. The data suggest the planet is warming at an alarming rate. What to do about it? Stephen Sackur interviews Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a movement dedicated to mass resistance and civil disobedience; how far are these climate rebels prepared to go? ‘I…


Dozens Of Migrant Children Report Being Sexually Abused After Being Separated From Parents By Trump Policy

By Garance Burke, Juliet Linderman & Martha Mendoza Associated Press (8/16/19) This story is part of an ongoing joint investigation between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE on the treatment of migrant children, which includes an upcoming film. After local Guatemalan officials burned down an environmental activist’s home, he decided to leave his village behind and flee to the United States, hoping he’d be granted asylum and his little boy, whose heart was failing, would receive lifesaving medical care. But after crossing the border into Arizona in May of last year, Border Patrol agents tore the man’s 7-year-old son from…


In The Shadows: The Mysterious Case Of Jeffrey Epstein

“I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.” — Alexander Acosta, former federal prosecutor and Trump Secretary of Labor. [Editor’s Note: This article was written before the death of Jeffrey Epstein. — Mark L. Taylor] By Leonard C. Goodman The Chicago Reader (8/1/19) There are several confounding mysteries surrounding the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old “financier” who was arrested July 6 on a federal sex trafficking indictment that alleges he recruited and sexually abused dozens of minor girls, some as young as 14 years old, beginning at least in or about 2002. And for reasons…


Joe Rogan Interview With Bernie Sanders

  Link to 1-Hour, 7-Minute Video ***** If You Think Bernie Shouldn’t Have Gone On Joe Rogan, Or Fox News, You’re Leaving Fellow Americans For Dead Ultimately, this is about reach. Electoral College Mindset has led us to believe that there are certain demographics who are lost to us totally, but this is ridiculous. Great interview! Read the Rest


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BERN NOTICE: SUSH! What We Are Told We Cannot Discuss

By David Sirota Bern Notice (8/16/19) “People will think what I tell them to think!” — Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane. As Bernie Sanders has been rising in post-debate polls, why are elite media pundits particularly angry at him? The explosion of rage tells us a lot about what the corporate media says we can and cannot discuss — and how frightened the establishment really is. Let’s review what happened: this week, the billionaire-owned Boston Globe and New York Times both rehashed an old media-manufactured trope pretending that Bernie Sanders doesn’t talk to people at parades and fairs (he does, a lot). This followed the Washington…


Russia Monitor: Trumputin, Moscow Mitch & Our Nation Of Dwindling Options

  By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (8/19/19) Dear Fellow Readers, I was sent quite a few links to articles and videos over the last few days and I find myself trying to make sense out of the hours worth of reading and video. With a heavy heart I feel like the United States is on a path to mediocrity, as if we have no vision for our future, as if we lack the will for rising above our lesser selves; no longer the country people look to for inspiration or even a safe haven. Let me organize some of…


Koch Brothers EXPOSED • FULL DOCUMENTARY

The Koch Brothers Grab $16.4 Million Every Day. [Editor’s Note: Given the impact of the surreptitious Koch brothers’ machinations in Wisconsin a review of their role in American politics is in order. There pernicious influence on universities is especially dangerous. This is a good, concise review. Be sure to watch all the way through the credits at the end. — Mark L. Taylor]  Brave New Films (1/21/15) The last time we exposed the Koch Brothers’ dealings to the world we here at Brave New Films wound up in their crosshairs. They produced online ad campaigns attacking us, but, it takes more…


A Commoner Writes: The Importance Of Citizens Speaking Up

I am now 78 years old and I have never experienced the amount of anxiety that I have currently. On Independence Day, I wrote a letter to the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram which was published on July 14. Several days later I received a letter in which the writer said I had “attacked him personally” and that he is “very angry”. Here is what I wrote: July 4, 2019, was one of the more depressing days of my life. I saw no reason to celebrate America’s Independence with all that has transpired since the 2016 elections. I remained at home, refusing…


Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Following Hitler’s Early Rhetoric & Policies

“From the leading constitutional lawyer who has sued every president since LBJ, a masterful explication of the ‘pillars of our democracy’.” — Amazon review By Steven Rosenfeld Independent Media Institute (8/9/19) A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s—when the Nazis took power in Germany. In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on…


Yes, It Could Happen Here: When 20,000 American Nazis Rallied In New York In 1939

Most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up. [Editor’s Note: Keep in mind there was a sizable number of German American Bund Nazis in Milwaukee in the years right before WWII. It happened here then and can happen here now. resist! — Mark L. Taylor]  By Abby Zimet Common Dreams (8/12/19) With Trump’s latest crime against the poor, the brown, the other – wherein immigrants may have to choose between food or housing and a green card – it’s a good time to consider a new book detailing the threat of a “21st-century master of divisive rhetoric” whose toxic mix of fear,…


At A Time Of Fascism, Concentration Camps, White Nationalism, Venality & Domestic Terrorism, Words To Remember

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” ― Frederick Douglass ***** And Just How Evil Are Our Tyrants? SUICIDE? Jeffrey Epstein’s Neck Was Broken In Multiple Places: Updated Autopsy Finds By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call…


‘Blood on their hands’: The Intelligence Officer Whose Warning Over White Supremacy Was Dismissed

[Editor’s Note: And let’s be clear, here: it was the Obama administration that caved to Republican pressure and buried the report on the rise of the threat of white nationalism. It is another example of corporate dems not standing fast in the face of opposition. They helped create the metastasizing fascist threat. No more. The time for such corporate dem spinelessness is done. — Mark L. Taylor] By Lois Beckett The Guardian (8/8/19) Ten years ago, the Department of Homeland Security sent American law enforcement agencies an intelligence briefing warning of a rising threat of domestic rightwing extremism, including white supremacist terrorism. The…